Conventionally, a plurality of substrate processing apparatuses has been used in manufacturing, for example, a substrate for a flat panel display or a semiconductor device, or a solar battery panel. For example, various kinds of substrate processing apparatuses such as, for example, a semiconductor wafer cleaning apparatus, a coating and developing apparatus, an etching apparatus, a film forming apparatus, and a heat treatment apparatus have been used in manufacturing a semiconductor device (see, e.g., Patent Document 1). Some of the substrate processing apparatuses are configured to issue an alarm when any failure occurs.
However, the substrate processing apparatuses tend to be complicated in configuration, and a failure tends to not only occur in a single area but also occur in correlated areas in a composite or chained manner. For example, in some cases, alarms may be issued in thousands of areas in a heat treatment furnace that conducts a batch processing of semiconductor wafers. In addition, when a failure occurs in such a substrate processing apparatus, it is difficult to accurately specify a failure occurring area and perform maintenance of the failure occurring area and an apparatus maintenance engineer is required to have a high skill.